Cry Havoc
by Maximen
Summary: "The 71st Annual Hunger Games. Landmark year, the first game of Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane. Won by Johanna Mason, District 7, scoring a 5 with an initial unprecedented 60-1 odds to win, claiming the title of victor with four kills and three injuries." - Gimmick's Index of the Annual Hunger Games, Chapter 71.
1. prologue

**prologue**

When Johanna Mason was fourteen-years-old and big enough to carry a set of tools and a backpack full of provisions, she had every other tough young thing with the skills and the size all took a freight train after school one afternoon and submitted themselves for winter logging employment. Her payment for her first month came in a sealed yellowed envelope at the end of December, and the first thing she did with her own money was to go to the barber and get her hair cut off.

The second thing she did was make her mother cry.

If Johanna had been a boy, this would have never become an issue; but she is also the eldest, and in Seven, there were expectations, especially when it came to one's family. Her father rolls his eyes when he sees the apparent devastation, but he's okay with the development, as far as they are concerned. "It's a phase," he informs his long-suffering wife. "And Snow's balls, woman, we need the added income."

That's all he will hear on the matter, in terms of employment, but unfortuality for Johanna, her list of sins was longer than just her newfound occupation. Her mother sits on her bed that night, desperately clasping her daughter's relucent hand, and begs her to never do anything like that again. She can overlook a lot of things, she says, but for the love of the Capitol, my girl, at least pretend to care about your appearance.

She knows that she did it on purpose. Her hair before had been long, shiny and strong, curly when she did nothing with it but in a charming way that spared her from long hours in front of a mirror. Her mother had long since lamented that it was her daughter's one saving grace. Everything else, apparently, Johanna was lacking in. She wasn't like her neighbours, gentle little things with skinny legs and fresh, pleasant faces. Johanna wasn't friendly, well-mannered, or otherwise engaging; the last time she'd had a little lady over to play with, she'd pushed the girl over into a mud pile, skirts and all. Ever since then, Johanna had been a social disappointment.

And it wasn't just her social skills. If it wasn't her attitude being too brusque then her posture was too arrogant, or her face was too sharp, or her shoulders were too wide; she had the hands of a workman and scowled too much. Her mother had intended for her daughter to live soft, cushy life of a housemate, only then Johanna uttered her first swear word at the age of nineteen months and it was all downhill from there. The fact that she had spawned two boys after only added salt to the wound.

If Johanna wasn't at risk of drawing disappointment from her father, she would demand that her mother give up on her, if she was such a failure. Why bother at all?

Instead, Johanna merely brushed her off, and the next few days consisted mostly of strained silences and pointed looks at home, and at work, occasional jokes and gibes until the foreman tells them to shut it up.

"Short hair, girl or no," Elah says with a snarl. "She still beats your sorry ass on the quotas. So shut your can and get to work."

Adamus, who was smart enough to probably end up in administration when he left school, raised both his eyebrows at her over the rims of his glasses. "I've got some hair product if you'll be needing it." He says, and she bares her teeth at him until he blanches. "No, seriously. It'd bring out your jawline. You'd look killer, Mason."

It's not much, it's barely anything, but she works herself hard afterwards and feels a little less patronized when he slaps her on the back with a _Job well done, Mason._

She experiments when she gets back home, with the product. It's for men and the tin is half rusted and it smells like something her father would use as an aftershave, feels like wood glue, but it works. Sweeping the locks away from her forehead and eyes, the sharp lines of her face were even more prominent. As an added bonus, there was no hiding the definition she was gaining in her neck and shoulders.

For the first time in a while, Johanna liked the way she looked.

Come Reaping time, of course, her mother had come up with a solution. It's the only other time aside from their respective birthdays that her mother insists she makes an effort, and the dresses that find her way into her bedroom closet stifling and long, intended to deceive and hide every single thing Johanna had grown to be proud of over the past year, even if her hair is a little too short to make the bows work. She puts up with it because she can't be bothered fighting, even though it makes her blood burn in her veins and scowl even more than usual.

"It's just a phase," her mother repeats the mantra, five, six times that very day, as if saying it will make it true. "You'll see, love. It's just a phase."

.

When Johanna Mason is seventeen-years-old, she is reaped into the 71st Hunger Games, picked out of nearly eight thousand others to be this year's fresh offering. The first thing she does when she gets aboard the tribute train is to spend twenty minutes looking at herself in the mirror, stricken with shock and swimming in a sea of total disbelief.

The second thing she does ― for the second time that day ― is to burst into a fit of tears.

Only this time, they're not the senseless, terrified kind that had slipped free on the long, silent vigil on the train platform. These ones are angry and loud, furious tears that stemmed from sheer, self-absorbed outrage.

Over thousand people between the ages of twelve to eighteen, roughly half of those are female and Johanna, out of all of them, who had only taken tesserae twice in her entire life, was the one to get chosen. She doesn't know the math off the top of her head, but she damn well knew that it was unlikely. What, over four thousand girls and the pre-Reaping dictated roughly that the higher percentage of slips were all those who took it the most? Johanna had sixteen slips in there. Sixteen. It didn't seem fair.

She has to laugh at herself for her naivety. Fair? Of course, none of it was _fair_. Nothing about anything had ever possessed the decency to be fucking fair.

Instinct has her beating on the long, shiny bathroom mirror that spans one wall. It doesn't smash or crack under her onslaught, which she should have expected all things considered, but it only makes her all the more furious.

She's angry at herself, she knows. Johanna is very much aware that she messed up at the Reaping. All the kids their age knew the basic tenets of survival when it came to the Games. Never look anywhere but forward, never as so much as glance at the person who gets Reaped, and if it's you, so help you, never fight back, never cause a scene and never, ever cry openly.

Johanna sure as Snow failed at the latter two.

She had been too stunned thought the Reaping ceremony to cry, but she ended up doing so when they were left to the vultures on the train platform. Johanna blames her family for that, blames Adamus, who had managed to pry himself away from that insanely overbearing mother of his ― a trait they had shared, and bonded over ― to say his goodbyes. "Get it done with and come home," he had said, bluntly as if it was that easy. "Can't leave me to deal with Elah and Paul alone now, can you?"

Her district partner was a slightly older boy Johanna did not recognise, from another part of Seven. He was tall and well muscled, with an easy grin and an apparent inability to take anything seriously. His name was Linden.

Their escort, Tacitus, the standard breed of Capitolist lunatic who flicked purple glitter everywhere whenever he so much as flinched, was smitten with Linden the second he showed his pleasant, angled face. Johanna, she realises rather quickly, might as well as not exist. Nobody calls for her when she vanishes, or sought to find her out. So she spends the first hour of this death-bound train ride furiously seething in her own company.

She runs both of her hands through her hair and marvels at the way her mother's bows and pins struggle to keep the curls in place. In a fit of renewed anger, she yanks out each individual accessory until her scalp is smarting and the sink is filled with prissy fake-silver pins and white, little bows. Johanna turns on the sink after a moment, wrenching out the filter and watching as they all go tumbling down the drain with a clatter. It is a strange, cleansing sort of feeling. From there, she gathers up water between her cupped palms and throws it over her face, running her wet hands through her short, free hair.

The change is grounding. Like this, free from that stupid silly cardigan thing her mother insists she wears, Johanna can again see the line of her shoulders. Even under this thing, she can feel the way her muscles coil when she shifts. She was always a bulky kid growing up, built like her father as opposed to her thin mother, but three years of work, three years of climbing and delimbing firs, had built her up in the only way hard work can.

Johanna shucks off the dress and throws it into a rejected corner when she returns to the main bedroom. Stood in her underwear, she sifts through the many and varied Capitol clothing left to her disposal and grimaces.

Most of them don't quite fit right, even if they're close, and Johanna wonders how they even do it at all. Do they have a train car devoted to clothes alone? Hundreds of different outfits for each gender and every range and size? There was roughly an hour and a half between when Johanna was reaped and when they set off, so maybe they did it then.

She snorts at all the effort and fishes out some hilarious jumpsuit number that looked like a coat on the top half, belt and everything. That'll do, she decides and Johanna makes a proper effort on her hair with water again (despite the finery, she notes, the bathroom and bedroom are shockingly absent of anything useful in that regard) sweeping the growing-in curls and dark waves away until her face is clear and bare.

Johanna snarls at herself in the mirror, picking out the slight sliver of scar tissue, the dark mark under her jaw left by the shape of Adamus' mouth and the bright, blazing hatred in her eyes.

There. That's much better.


	2. train

**train.**

The uncomfortable fact about their District is that they could be Career if they wanted it. They wouldn't, of course, never would - Seven was a people of realists in a world where work was hard and consuming, and the Capitol bit in a bit too hard for it to ever be right in their eyes, but they were well of enough to make it count. Their tributes, each year, if they were old enough, from the right area, usually made good odds. They were on par with Four and they did it without any prior training, making up for what they lack in organized "sports centres" with gruelling work and harsh conditions.

In their combined history, Seven has managed to scrape out a grand total of thirteen victors. Most of them are dead, now. Three are left.

Two of them are aboard with the tributes and they filter in before dinner, dressed down from their suits and coats with the informal company. Twin killers, overgrown and older from their Arena days but forever immortalized as teenagers, a weird juxtaposition that sits awkwardly in Johanna's mind because she's spent her childhood being taught about these Victors; a once-a-year school tour of the games museum, recaps on TV during their Appreciation Classes and endless Hunger Games broadcasting. To see them in the flesh was almost disappointing.

Blight is the youngest of the two, ten years out and bigger now than he had been all those years ago, standing nearly eight inches taller than Johanna did. He's the only one of them - aside from one or two Victors long dead - who has killed more than one Career in actual combat, and as far as District pride went, nearly slicing a fellow eighteen-year-old in half with a felling axe was about as Seven as one could get. He paid for it with a mace to the head that had left him a little slower upstairs. His mentor, Dara, stood beside him. Johanna was less familiar with him. Victor the 38th and older than her father. Sterner, by the look of him, too. He's balding, bearded much like everyone other adult male Johanna knew, and round.

"Let's take a look at you, then." The eldest of them all orders with an audible sigh, ignoring their escort and his endless prattling, and giving Blight a significant, wary sort of look that Johanna couldn't understand and didn't care to. "How old are you both?"

Linden, of course, is the first to speak. "I'm eighteen," he proudly declares. "Nearly nineteen."

"And you, my darling?" He was talking to Johanna.

"Seventeen," Johanna mutters to the floor, hating everything about it, about them. She had just turned seventeen. Her Reaping outfit had been the gift from her parents; her token was her father's old wristwatch, another present. The hands glowed in the dark.

Despite the fact that he was hurtling down to his own demise at over two hundred miles per hour, Linden is an enthusiastic participant, as far as things go. He answers all of Dara's questions happily, recalling memories of winning school marathons and being the tallest boy in his class. Johanna, by comparison, doesn't advertise much. She folds her arms and chews at her lips and shrugs when Dara questions her upbringing.

Tacitus, who might think he was being helpful, comments on Johanna's "mysterious quiet nature" in what seems like a last-ditch effort to find something, and Linden laughs as if it is a joke.

"I'll take the girl," Blight finally speaks up.

Dara shoots him a glance, as if he wasn't expecting Blight to speak at all.

"Are you... sure?" The question is hesitant but not exactly sincere. He doesn't appear ready to actually argue with Blight over his decision. Who would, after all, when they have such a splendid specimen as her district partner as an option?

Blight's jaw twitches and Johanna scowls. Dara flips both of his hands up in surrender and shakes his head.

"Fine then." He smiles. "That's fine. Linden, that okay?"

Johanna tilts her head up to look at Blight. He wasn't much; never really was. Open-faced and bored-looking, too big and too tall. When he finally realises that she's looking at him, he shrugs.

* * *

Seven's Reaping ceremony was broadcast earlier than those Districts on the east coast by virtue of being closer to the Capitol, but their route would take just as long as the others. Less than a day, if that. The first thing on Tacitus' agenda is lunch, which Johanna assumes is the Capitol's version of dinner, and he shepherds both of the tributes over into another car, where an eight-person table is surrounded by delicate glass finary and a wide, clear window.

Johanna and Linden are given one side of the table, separated by the middle chair, while the victors sit on each end. Tacitus, of course, gets one full side to himself, where he can see everyone.

For some reason that Johanna assumes is sheer opulence, lunch comes in three separate dishes, which is enough meals to stretch them the full day. The first thing to arrive is some kind of fish that Tacitus immediately introduces as a tartare - a word Johanna has never heard of in her life - and it is accomplished with a salad-something-pancetta, with chunks of apple and drunken goat cheese.

Sat next to her on her left elbow, Blight completely ignores everything on his plate save for adjusting its position and flipping over a few choice objects. The only thing he entertains is some Capitolist version of coffee that was more alcohol than actual beans.

"Easy there," Dara laughs at the tributes as they stuff themselves. "By all means, it's a good thing to work on putting weight before the Arena, but trust me on this, neither of you wants to end up on an upset stomach."

Johanna is just about to question the man's judgement when the second course comes, and she sees his reasoning. It's thinly sliced rib-eye with marbled potatoes and at least twelve different kinds of minuscule vegetable of various colour. The carrots themselves come in orange, purple and white. With the dish comes a small glasses of auburn liquor that is supposedly there to go on the meat, but before Johanna can so much as look at it, Blight leans over and puts it back on the server's tray.

"I've had liquor before," Johanna complains, more out of a need to save face than any actual need to drink.

"I'm sure you have." Blight doesn't even look at her. He glances down at her side plate. "Eat your vegetables."

Beside her, Linden snickers as he prods at a stuffed leek. Johanna clenches her teeth. "What is that one of your secret mentor tactics?" She asks. "Got any other strategies you want to share?"

"Oh, it's far too early to be talking about that," Tacticus says gently. "Not over lunch. It would certainly spoil my appetite."

 _And the gruesome slaughter of twenty-three kids live on television in high-resolution technicolour doesn't?_ Johanna wants to ask, but Dara clears his throat. "He's right," he says. "Best to wait for the rest of the reaping coverage. Get eyes on the competition."

Blight looks at Dara for a few moments, then to his plate, before his eyes flick back up to Johanna and then finally settle on his steak knife. He shrugs again as he picks it up deftly between his fingers, balancing the blade.

By the time the third and final course arrives, Johanna is starting to feel sick and has barely touched anything on her plate save for a few slices of meat and the choice vegetable. Tacticus insists that they all have a slice of some dense cake-like dessert each, but much like the rest of the affluent meal, Johanna can only pick at it. The others make polite conversation as the two tributes poke and prod their desert.

Game data, they talk about. Statistics, ratios and percentages, spreads and starting bets. Blight grunts once when Dara asks about the starting pool and it is apparently a sufficient answer. Something about professionals, backers, spenders and favours - weird, Games jargon that Johanna struggles to make out. Tactius suggests that their combined pool might be larger this year, eyes locked on Linden, and that earns him a stern look from Dara.

They are given coffee to wash desert down with, and a curious sip reveals that it's not got the same alcohol content as her mentor's. It's better than the stuff they get at home, at any rate. Johanna drinks it down with no complaints. Ten minutes drag on. Dara pours a sizable amount of something strong from his flask into his coffee and complains about restraint. Tacitus laughs.

Blight glances at the smooth metallic wristwatch half hidden under the cuff of his shirt and makes a grunt-like noise in confirmation. He gives Dara a long, pointed look as he stands up from his chair. Linden copies the movement like a startled jack-in-the-box.

"Program's about to start," is all that Blight says, and he snaps the knife he was holding straight into the placemat with a mere flick of the wrist.

* * *

They all go to sit in another compartment, across three separate couches made of soft leather and a large television screen. Tacitus immediately demands that they have coffee and "treats", but nobody is much in the way of hungry. Johanna sits on the side of the couch closest to the door, away from everyone else and picks at the stitching hidden beneath the padding.

There is a forty-minute warm up before the Reapings are aired, where Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith debate among themselves about the upcoming "selection" of Tributes and what they expect to see from this year's Games. By now, anyone reaped will have been collected and packaged up, speeding their way to the Capitol, from Two all the way to the furthest reaches of Ten. After a discussion over potential Arena themes, Caesar turns the conversation over with a brief fanfare.

It's time to reveal this year's contestants.

It starts off the same as every year. The same sixteen/eighteen split from One, two tall, sleek youths by the name of Aureole and Orville, volunteering for two other younger, less appealing children. District 2 is the same eighteen-year-old athletes, a pair of hardened looking near-adults. Flint and Cybele are their names. The male, Flint, is even bigger and taller than Linden is. His biceps bigger than Johanna's head.

Three is a comparatively disappointing mix of a fourteen and seventeen year old. Four is a pair of sixteen-year-olds, brown-skinned and athletic and, apparently, cousins. Dylan and Amelia volunteer together.

Five and Six are less interesting; three older tributes over the age of fifteen and one younger one. Then there is District 7, and Johanna watches herself mutely climb the stage and stare off into space in a state of utter shock. She all but ignores Tactcius as he jostles and congratulates her, stood awkwardly in that stupid dress her mother had forced her into that very morning.

Linden makes a far better impression.

"Well there's a strapping contender," Templesmith says in the way of commentary.

"Hm, yes, not entirely rare for District 7." Is Flickerman's verdict, and they move on to District 8.

Johanna doesn't pay much attention after that, especially when Linden turns to grin at them all.

"Did you see that?" He demands and lets out an excited laugh. "He called me a strapping contender!"

Dara and Tacticus appease him as needed. Johanna makes to stand, but she's cut off by Blight, who skims the flat of his thumb over the jumpsuit covering her shoulder.

"Let's have a talk," he says and Johanna is under the impression that it's an order, not a request. She heaves herself up onto her feet and follows him back to her room, eyes drilling into the space between his shoulder blades, shirt stretched taught in that silly Capitolist fashion where everyone has to wear clothes seemingly three times too small.

Blight doesn't say anything when he sees the discarded clothes thrown all over her room, but his lip does curl upward in the corner when he spots her discarded Reaping dress in one corner. Johanna throws herself onto the end of her bed and stares him down, folding her arms.

"Well?"

Blight inhales heavily. "I'm just wondering if this is..." he pauses, the fingers of his left hand suddenly rubbing together, mechanically, until he blinks and frowns. "What to do with you." He grunts, fixes his gaze onto Johanna's and flicks his free, non-fretting hand behind over his shoulder. "Quite a show back there."

Johanna's mind recalls every single interview she suffered through every passing Appreciation Day, the way fancy Capitol programming wizardry couldn't quite cover up abrupt changes in speech and long, unexpected lapses and she very nearly smacks herself on the forehead. She wonders if it is too late to demand that they swap.

"Well, it's not like I was prepared for any of this stupid shit!" Johanna snaps, and he blinks at her, nonplussed.

"No one ever is," he says. "Well. Aside from me, I suppose."

Blight volunteered for his Games, she remembers. She has to wonder if he was always mentally deranged and mace had only added to his troubles. He shakes his head.

"Look. We need to-... Get to basics." He looks around the room for a moment, as if looking for a chair, but as there is nothing aside from the bed and dresser, so merely adjusts his posture into a more comfortable one, folding both arms over his chest. "This year is a Landmark Game, you know what that means?"

Johanna did not make a habit of watching the Games when she could help it. Work was widespread enough in Seven that one could get away with not watching mandatory broadcasts, as there couldn't possibly be a separate TV screen for every felling team. What she had to watch at home or at school she tuned out, and everything else, there was no point. Even her mother, who was usually a stickler for the particulars, did not begrudge her this.

"Last year..." she recalls, hazily and Blight nods.

"70 wasn't just a decade, it was Ajax Bellwillow's last year as Head Gamemaker." Last year was District 4, Johanna recalls. A good arena by all accounts to those who care, but the Victor broke down almost immediately and survived only because she could swim where everyone else just straight up drowned. She was said to be insane by now. "Landmark Games are important years that aren't necessarily Quells. This year we've got a new Head Gamemaker. We call 'em Transition Periods in the business."

"And what does any of this crap mean for me?" Johanna asks, impatient. Blight gives her a searching look.

"What this means is that there is gonna' be a big focus on the Arena. Gamemakers slated for promotion spend years preparing their debut. Crane is going to want to make an impression, and that means a lot of attention is going to be on him. This is in your favour right now, but you need to get into gear before the audience's attention eventually returns to you and the other tributes." He considers her for a moment, his jaw working over something in thought. His eyebrows begin to pinch together. "There are a lot of older tributes this year."

He says it as if it was an understatement. Johanna snorts.

"That's bad," She guesses, and is rewarded with a stiff nod.

Almost all of the victors, save for some guy named Odair who won six years ago at fourteen, were older. Careers usually had all their lives to prepare for the Games. To a lesser extent, so did Seven, especially those who grew up in the camps working from thirteen, but that cut no ice unless you volunteered. All of District 7's previous Victors had all worked in the camps.

"That is indeed bad, to a certain extent." Blight seems pleased, at least, that Johanna is actually responding. "Older kids are harder, stronger and faster, they're smarter, they don't necessarily die as quick. We'll get to your full strategy later, but right now, you need to keep on with what you're doing. Keep your head down."

"Wait, you want me to do this?" Johanna very nearly died of a heart attack, her surprise was that sudden and potent. How in the name of the Capitol was she supposed to make _this_ into a tactic?

"Look." Blight says, one hand making some kind of calming gesture at her startled expression. "Sponsors as a whole are a reactive base. I'm not gonna go bore you with the specifics, not now, but it is very little in the pool for a tribute that breaks down." Johanna is about to argue when he flips a hand up, silencing her. "You remember who won the 8th?"

That was over sixty years ago, but Johanna, like any other kid in a District that educated it's minors until eighteen, even if only for the summer, thought back and ran through that silly little rhyme they were taught. That disturbing, musical number that was updated yearly by some morbid maniac in the Capitol, the one that Johanna didn't realise was a list of the Game's Victors and their "techniques" until her mother complained and her father pulled her aside to explain.

"Lennox, the last weakling of District 2." She recalls.

"Well, you remember more than I do." Blight concedes. "What I do remember is that no one has ever tried to play the weakling card since, and from what I can tell, no one else seems to remember."

Johanna can't believe that he is actually considering this. That he wants her to play along. She looks at him for a moment, this older, harder man wearing the general likeness of 61's Victor, auburn-haired and tall, built up but also fatter with privilege. Blight - a nickname, single-word identifier, like Brutus and Lyme. Johanna wonders if anyone aside from the Captiol actually knows his real one. District 7's only volunteer. Three kills and two injuries. The video clip of him throwing his axe and cleaving Four in half is rated as one of the best winning kills to date. And he wants her to play the weakling.

Uncomfortably, she realises, that is exactly what she probably would have done otherwise. She sets her jaw and scowls.

Blight sighs.

"I get it, it's... not ideal, but Sponsors are tight, and- you've already done the damage." He breathes out, evidently aware that Johanna has been studying him. He runs a hand over his face. "You need to decide now, in any case. As soon as I leave this room I'm going to do one of two things –- I'm either going to ring up my regulars and bargain with them to try and get you on a decent starting pool, or I'm going to put my hands up and make a show of giving up."

"Linden..." Johanna has to ask. She rakes her fingernails over her arms in irritation. Even the thought of Linden is enough to start making her crave a knife to hold.

"He's got a fairly decent start, I'd say. He's older and good looking, and he's Seven. That's usually enough."

"I don't like him."

She doesn't want to have an alliance with that boy. He reminds her of Paul, all smiles and grins and leering, accustomed to getting everything from looks and personality alone. If she has to deal with him more than she has to, Johanna is certain that she's going to end up trying to bury her fingernails in his throat.

Blight, much to her relief, doesn't look set to argue. If anything he looks relieved.

"That makes it easier, I guess, but keep it to yourself." He rolls his shoulders back. "I'll come up with some excuse for Dara. I'm sure it won't be that hard."

"Why? You've been a mentor for ten years. Don't tell me you do this with every sucker who gets thrown in." She challenges, with more bite than she really knew was necessary. Dara is Blight's mentor. Surely they would be working together, at least until the sixty seconds are up. Unless he was a sop, which in that case, he'd deserve it when she gets cut open by some brute of a two and her innards decorate the arena. Would serve him right.

Blight gives her that same unreadable look from before.

"Aside from it being my job?" He points to her arms. "Woodcutter's musculature. You tellin' me a kid at yer' age who's on a logging team is gonna' to burst into fits are the first sign of pressure? What did you do?"

Blight's accent has always been Seven, but the way he lets drop the forced adjustments to his tone hits home, and hard. Something like hope stirs in her chest before she stomps it away.

"Climb, mostly. Sometimes I buck as well. Winter fir harvesting."

Blight grunts. "Linden in there?" He ticks his head in the direction of the other compartment. "He does hurdles."

Johanna grimaces.

"I'm not joking." Blight continues, deadpan. "I'll put it to shock and whatever the hell happened with your family and friends, but from 'ere on out, it's all show. Aint no Seven, out in those woods, got a bad shot and I'm pretty sure you're itching to prove you ain't no weakling, right?" Johanna glares and Blight glares back. "Get the upset out of your system today, take all the time you need, but the second we start pulling into the Capitol I want you on your game - to play meek. Keep quiet, start listening and watching. The biggest thing you'll come up against at the moment is keeping that boy unaware of your true capabilities. Oh, and the sylists, who are probably gonna inch out every single killing instinct you have with their sheer-..."

He drifts off, smothering a wince.

"Just play nice, get that?"

Johanna wants to burst into angry tears. Or start hitting him. "And that's your brilliant plan?" She demands. "Suck it up and deal with it?"

He sighs at her, as if she's too stupid to understand and shakes his head.

"If you'll excuse me, I've gotta go and, uh, make a show of giving up entirely."

Just as he turns to shut the door, Johanna flashes around and finds the nearest big, breakable thing - some ugly as glass vase thing that looks like a curled up corpse from her angle - and throws it over her head after him. It shatters on the edge of the door as it slams shut.


	3. captiol

**capitol.**

Remake was a special kind of ordeal, and one Johanna had not been at all been prepared for.

In Seven, the best thing they could hope for was a hot bath, a bit of hair product, clothes that hadn't been worn to work and, perhaps, a shave - and then, only usually for the boys who were convinced that it would grow back thicker if they did. The last time Johanna was at the mercy of someone else when it came to her own appearance, it was with her mother the morning of the Reaping. Washboard rough hands ripping the brush through her hair with enough force to sting. Insistent muttering about etiquette and decorum and other stupid words Johanna had no need for when she was out delimbing hundred foot firs in the ice cold of winter.

Only, if her mother was bad, the Captiolists who make up her prep team were downright awful.

There are three of them, plus her Stylist herself. Two men and a woman, more of a girl, who somehow looks twelve years younger than Johanna did. The urge to look on in abject horror is too strong for her to bypass - the girl is grotesque.

Her name is Eglantine, and to Johanna, she looks like a little Capitol doll; eyes that have been altered somehow to look twice as big, almost luminously orange. Tiny little body, with a pale, soft face and curly hair coloured a deep, dark red.

The other two, men of various disfigurements and clearly the senior staff, take the lead.

Johanna quickly learns that the term Treatment is a straight up lie, and _Butchering_ would be a term more apt to fit its description. As they remove every glaring imperfection that they can find, Johanna hisses and squirms, biting back curses as her skin is chemically "repaired" to remove her scars. Her hands are the worst. Bad enough that they have to bandage the soft new skin. It stings at first, but then the sensation turns into a persistent burning itch that makes Johanna want to drag her palms down the roughest surface she can find. The endless series of creams and salves and gritty pastes are no help.

She is thankful for only one thing. Eglantine, who is either mute or simply prefers silence, is the one to remove the mark left behind from Adamus' dirty little joke from the night before. The blemish disappears, fades with a lingering stinging sensation, and it appears that only them were ever aware of its existence. Although, Johanna does not look at her to confirm, embarrassed despite herself.

In the end, all she can do is try to recall the original experience, now that she has no aftermath to remember it by. It leaves her feeling funny in the middle.

She did not want to think of him, of them, especially not home. Not here. It felt wrong.

Instead, Johanna redirects her attention toward Percival and Roman, who prefer to talk about themselves and their experiences instead of even remotely paying Johanna any worthwhile attention, other than to tell her to stop twitching or to move a limb. Percival is particularly rapturous. He met a man who was so totally into him now that he's a stylist in the Hunger Games, you see. Roman wonders aloud if there are any Hunger Game couple-based activities for romantic getaways.

It's easy to lose herself in their chatter. Between that, and the clenching of her jaw, the pain is just about bearable.

For everything else, there is her mentor. Johanna does not like Blight much, if at all, but she is thankful for his continued presence nonetheless.

His own prep team had done something to him while she was away. Hair shorter on the back and sides, the ends sharper and cleaner. His beard was shorter, too. He arrived in a suit that, again, looked too small to be comfortable with a lingering scowl on his face and a proverbial - or maybe not - axe to grind.

"I told you," Blight directed his ire at Roman, the ringleader of the multicoloured crazy brigade. "No surgical alterations. You clean her up and that's that."

"It wouldn't take much," Roman whines as if it's an actual concern of his, the fact that Johanna has more muscles than she has curves. Johanna realises with a severe amount of disdain that it's likely true. "A small alteration would do wonders-"

"And it might go implicate my tribute in the Arena." Blight snaps back. "Do what you need to do and nothing more. There's no point. Save your resources for making an impression post-remake if we get that sodding far."

That last bit hurt, even though Johanna suspected that it was part of the so-called plan. Percival hissed and skirted back in loathing, running his green jewelled fingertips across Johanna's arm in what would be a soothing manner if not for the fact that said hand was attached to someone who would no doubt be celebrating her death in a few days.

Blight notices, but doesn't say anything, or otherwise allude to the fact. Instead, he has orders for them; no alterations and no hair extensions. Base zero and not a millimetre over the threshold.

According to her stylists, this was a complete and utter tragedy.

"It's almost as if he doesn't want his tributes to flourish!" Percival looks close to tears, but either the situation isn't as upsetting as he first imagined or he is worried about his makeup running because any traces of moisture are gone by the time Johanna can do a double take. Roman gives him a consoling pat on the shoulder.

"Now," he says as he works on standing Johanna up, pink, naked and prickling like a raw plucked chicken. "Now, we wouldn't want to say that," he gives Johanna a thin smile. "We all know how much effort the mentors put into their tributes. I can't imagine trying to pull off a display after last year!"

Last year, Johanna thought back as she tried to balance on her feet, hunting soles and all. That girl, they must mean - the District 4 one who swam. Annie Something. Annie was very pretty, she remembered. Her stylists must have loved Pretty Annie.

Percival nods and nods and nods. "Such beauty, it's a sha-"

The statement is cut short by the abrupt entrance of a tall, thin woman who Johanna immediately recognises as her primary stylist. Celesto has been District 7's female stylist going on ten years, which directly coincides with their last victory, Johanna discerns with a lingering mix of dread and discomfort.

"Leave, leave," the woman is all waving arms and metal bangles, wearing a dark green sash that would be appealing if not for the fact that it was more revealing than Johann was strictly comfortable with. "Leave us! I'll see you on the show floor!"

Kisses are exchanged between the four of them as the three junior stylists all file out with waves and good lucks. Before Johanna can even mutter a reply, she's alone with Celesto and her shimmering silver bands.

Johnna is made to turn, to raise her arms, spread them out on either side while Celesto circles her and makes comments about weight, bulk and posture. In a few short minutes, she's determined that Johanna looks like a boy - if she stopped slouching she'd look far more effeminate, with a wonderful profile but oh, do stop frowning. A smile goes a long way! And the breadth of her shoulders will make the costume come out one-sided, last-minute preparations will have to be made.

"I have to admit I'm horribly jealous of Casbus," she sighs after awhile, moving between sketchbooks with wide angled swashes of green and not much else. "That Linden is such a handsome boy, with the right body- oh you I can deal with, I suppose. At least you've got some weight on your bones - all wrong composition, but with a little work I can make your curves come out deliciously."

It takes a lot of effort not to flinch at the comment, and to avoid getting caught, Johanna looks to the floor instead.

"What to do what to do? I'm thinking leaves this year, our last attempt was lukewarm, but you two are good looking young people, yes? Yes. Leaves, wonderful leaves - pretty pretty, much like you... are," the woman lets out a small laugh at the end of the statement, more one of genuine humour then scorn.

But leaves? Johanna can't help but wince. It's been years, and if it's not trees than it's foliage, or in the case of that one year when they had two boys and two girls, lumberjacks. Ever since they've had Celesto they've had trees. Or parts of trees.

She remembers the kids from last year for the 70th, who wore jumpsuits with tiny wooden plates attached to the fabric. They came out looking like trees themselves, and Johanna would have found the thing appealing if the two kids hadn't come from the poorest areas of Seven and, as a result, looked like twigs as opposed to trunks.

As Celesto advanced on her with bushels of suspicious looking foliage, Johanna wondered if this was how they felt.

* * *

In the end, she had a right to be suspicious.

The costumes they are put into are nothing but strategically placed loops of plant life. Johanna enters into the basement feeling exposed, but at the same time, her blood rushes through her limbs, pushes it into her heart with a high, unrelenting pressure that makes her throat beat hard and her head swim.

It's nothing like she imagined it would be, somehow both better and worse.

The other Tributes stay close together, even the Careers. From her position stood with Linden, who looks even more on display since the foliage covers only his waist and one shoulder, she can see a few of the others. The duo from Four are dressed in shimmering scales and long sashes of dark blue fabric. At one point, the boy from District 10 starts shouting, and Johanna turns just in time to see him lunge for one of his stylists.

"Lunatic, that one," Linden mutters under his breath, making some sort of weird leg movements. His costume was probably as uncomfortable as hers was. "Kyeler or something, right? Wouldn't stop screaming. I think he had to have a Peacekeeper guard on him in remake."

"Oh," Johanna mutters, and he gives her a funny look, like he was expecting an alternative response. He shifts again.

"What, you didn't hear? Lucky. Gave me a headache after ten minutes." He smiles, but it looks uncomfortable, and he looks back toward the other tributes before returning his attention back to her, a little too intensely for her liking. "You look- uh, nice, though. All your scars are gone! You look pretty without them, almost like the other girls. They took away a scar on my knee and it- well it was fine, it didn't hurt nothin', ah. In fact, nothing hurt at all-"

Johanna catches her district partner making an odd arm gesture, and before she can stop herself, her eyes track the movement to its source. She blanches when she realises what it is he was doing.

"What are you doing?!" She hisses, eyes wide. "Not here!"

"My skin is burning up!" He gasps as he pushes one of his hands down under his loops of greenery, on his hip. Johanna has the sinking suspicion that is not what he is trying to itch, however. "What did she use for this?"

"Stop touchi-"

"I think it's poisonous," Linden shifts uncomfortably, but blessedly removes his arms and keeps them stiffly at his sides, though he keeps up the weird, dancing foot movements, almost as if he was trying to avoid rubbing his thighs together.

Sure enough, none of their stylists or the mentors are in sight, either. Johanna inhales sharply.

Her District partner clenches his teeth. "Is it poisonous?"

"How wo-"

"You're from the Eastern end, right?" Linden looks her straight in the eyes, and he'd almost look nonchalant if not for the wild look of panic reflecting in his irises. "You know trees and shit, you work in the logging camps."

That is true enough, and while Johanna didn't like his tone, she also hated the fact that he's the only tribute shifting around while everyone else is standing still and ready, even the nervous ones.

She sets her teeth and looks at the greenery near his hip. It's not hard to identify; ever since she was old and big enough to climb trees, run off into the woods alone, she has known. Her father had sat her down with a book when she was perhaps three or so, said look at these, these will make your skin hurt. One of her earliest memories is him taking her out for lessons like these.

Bringing up that memory and applying it to her current situation gives her mixed feelings at best, and Johanna determines the nature of the red stems and leaf shape with begrudging efficiency.

"Sumac," she snaps, and is just about to inform the idiot that he'll have to wait and not to scratch when someone whistles from across the threshold.

It's the boy from District 1, dressed in shimmering fabrics studded with finery. It makes him look like royalty. "Little Seven gettin' an eyeful there!" He shouts, "You should come over here! The view is larger!"

His point was punctuated with a suggestive hip gesture. Johanna almost immediately turns away from it, her scowl digging into the floor. The front end of the procession erupts into laughter.

Linden laughs along with them, but it's edged with something desirous she doesn't like.

It sets the tone for the whole parade, at any rate. The rest of it is a blur, spent in a confusing state of uncertainty, fury and discomfort. Mostly the fury, the deep insidious feeling that made the whole thing feel ludicrous, drowned out only by the surrounding noise. The crowd was deafening. Johanna doesn't look up to clarify, but she feels the lens on her for a small, creeping period, as if a mere courtesy. Linden waves beside her, looking stiff but otherwise cheery, putting on a good show.

It's when the President starts talking that Johanna finally looks up - there are rules, after all, and while she's angry she's not stupid. And then there is that niggling element of sheer curiosity. To see the man that has ruled the country longer than she's been alive, in the flesh.

She's not sure what she expected; the man himself a blur, an unsure silver and grey shape surrounded by ornamental stone arches, banners and the slight snippet of equally unsure blank faces in Panem official greys and reds. The President talks, in his standard Capitol drawl, as he always does, about honour and sacrifice and the Good of the Games. The crowd screams in response.

Johanna finds herself at the Tribute Centre's doors before she knows it, a Happy Hunger Games ringing in her ears, a chorus of May the Odds pounding inside her skull and the vague blurry shape of the President itching behind her eyes.

* * *

"Sumac!" Dara snarls when they are both freed from their chariots, grabbing Linden's arm and firmly removing it away from his private area, which he had been shielding the whole way back, as if to make a move to scratch but fully committing. A good thing, because Johanna might have slapped him off of the chariot if he had so much as moved an inch to do so, weakling plan be damned. "I thought they _knew_ -"

Blight seemingly materialises out of nowhere, looking strained as Linden starts to dispense of his outfit, practically in the nude before he could even get into the elevator. Blight stood between them, as if to protect Johanna's mental state along with the modesty of her district partner, who had nothing but Dara's jacket to keep him covered.

The doors have barely opened when Dara drags Linden back to his room, peppering a series of orders for the shower with proficiency, seething. Blight, once they have been surpassed by the two other rushing men and are alone save for the Avoxes, turns to Johanna.

"No itching?" She shakes her head at his question, and he sighs. "Good. Get it off. Should have some clothing in there your size. Take a shower and I'll come and have a talk with you before dinner."

Her rooms, at least, are far more luxurious than the ones she was issued on the train. Wood panelled walls with deep, dark rugs, shiny floors that must have come from Seven, given the consistency - Hickory, colour washed and treated with some sort of finish, but still real, not the faux plastic stuff that was mass produced and used at home. Johanna spends most of her time scrubbing off dark highlights and freeing her hair of whatever abomination Roman treated it with. The plant-costume goes sailing off into the sink, along with all her accessories, left to fester.

At first, the stress on her skin is impossible to ignore; she could discern no red stemmed leaves, but the treatments left over from remake had taken their toll. Her skin was healing, yes, but it felt abraded, like she'd skinned her knees again when she was a kid, but everywhere, and without the blood. Johanna spends a few minutes investigating the shower, and figures out she can not only change the pressure of the water but that there is a herbal healing balm option that comes in a variety of smells.

She comes out of it... better. Not her 100%, but better. Making a mental note to remember the name of that particular concoction for later, Johanna goes to get dressed, wrapping herself up in towels and avoiding the suspicious looking mat with yellow feet marks.

The closet is programmable and much to her surprise, contains clothing that is functional and appealing, unlike the ghoulish fashions she had seen over the past day. One shirt out of the thousands available for her choice takes her fancy, some weird flappy number that came in orange, white or black. Johanna picked the latter and with it, a set of cropped soft trousers of a similar shade. Her hair, she left wet. It would dry quickly enough.

With nothing else to do, Johanna crossed the room to investigate the window.

Beyond the horizon, the moon shone against the glittering cityscape. In the far distance, millions of lights caused the dense mass of skyscrapers glitter and Johanna took it in with quiet interest. Despite what she thought of the place, she had also never seen anything like it. Seven's major urban zone was five dozen or so buildings surrounding two lumber factories and the town square. The Tribute Center was one of the tallest buildings in the Capitol and stood separate amongst official parks and ceremonial roads. People were needle points and cars were blood cells flowing through the veins of city blocks. Despite the time, the hustle and bustle never came to a halt. She couldn't hear, but she imaged that they were celebrating.

Celebrating her impending death, she reminded herself with a snarl and turns away.

Blight gives an odd look when he arrives, to which she merely raises an eyebrow. "What?" She grumbled, annoyed at Blight and the lunatics beyond her bedroom window. "You asked me to get comfortable."

"I did." Came his neutral reply, shrug and all. He crosses the room and picks up one of her pillows, a peerless white and overly stuffed thing. "Here," he says, adjusting it so it was facing her. "Hit it."

"What?" Johanna was struck blank.

"I said hit it, girl."

She does, annoyed and confused, and he gives her a look of disbelief.

"You call that hitting something?" Blight demands, and so she hits it harder, properly. Imagines that it's Saffrin Niklas back home in Seven, when she thought it would be funny to hook her brother Ben, who was afraid of heights, upon a branch a good ten feet off of the floor. Wasn't so funny for her afterwards. Johanna was twelve, she thinks. Only this time around there is no Saffrin, no pretty little nose, but the surprisingly solid impact of cotton and memory foam.

Johanna immediately understands what it was for.

By the time she has stopped punching, the pillow is thoroughly misshapen and she is breathing hard. Blight dumps it back onto the mattress unceremoniously.

"Here, both hands behind your head- there, now deep breaths, concentrate on getting oxygen. Good girl." He nods as Johanna breathes, skin feeling hot but not otherwise sweaty, not yet. "Good, in here, only in here, and only when I'm around to manage it. We'll be going over your strategy aft-.. after dinner, but I wanted to let you know that you've been doing a decent job so far. Stylists said you were quiet, and- mn, what I've- seen from the commentary suggests much of the same."

It wasn't hard, Johanna thinks. Between her attempts to not broadcast her disdain for every single second of this perverse display, what little modesty she had left her wanting to curl up and sink into the floor. Or, better yet, launch herself at the passing smiling faces until they stopped.

She can't imagine the look on her mother's face, her reaction to Johanna's outfit... Part of Johanna took immeasurable glee in it, but it's a short-lived feeling. She's assuming that her mother had found the strength to watch at all; she might have been curled up in bed, worry-stricken, for all she knew. It almost made Johanna feel guilty. She knew her father would watch, he'd sit in the main room with his glass of ration ticket issued barley alcohol at his seat at the table, maybe even in the dark, and watch. Her brothers, maybe. Elden might if he could convince their father, Ben certainly not, not if their mother had any say, he was far too young.

Then she imagines Adamus watching that whole performance and the guilt is replaced with contempt. Johanna wonders what would happen if she flung herself from the balcony roof.

"Hey," Blight snaps and Johanna throws her head up to meet his gaze in shock. "Remember; get that out, you need to be on your game."

He waits for a few seconds, waits for Johanna to shove everything back, every memory and lingering feeling until it was them, the room with its big long window and the cold air coming from the ceiling, and the thoroughly abused pillow. When she finally scowls back at him, he deflates.

"All finished?" Blight asks, mock-sweet.

"For now," Johanna huffs. She brought her arms down heavily, hands slapping at her sides.

Her mentor shuts his eyes and nods again. "Wait until the Games. Wait until it's time. As for... the rest, the whole thinking thing? Not now. I'll let you know when you've got time to mourn."

Johanna was just about to demand what in the name of Panem that was supposed to mean when Tacitus calls them for dinner.

With some mounting frustration, following her mentor all obedient-like out the door into the main threshold, she suspects that she wouldn't have got a worthwhile explanation anyway.


	4. axe

**axe.**

Johanna's training uniform was flat uninspired grey, and it met her on an equally uninspiring grey morning. It was fitting, if anything, matching her mood quid pro quo.

By the time she graced her mentor with her presence, the clouds outside are dark and spitting. She found Blight sat at the table, papers strewn around in an organised sense of chaos and a bowl of something hot at his elbow. He didn't look up when he heard her sit down, but instead frowned down at a page he had pinned with a thumb and index finger.

"Linden and Dara have headed on down. You've got ten minutes at the very most." Voice rough and edged with sleep, Blight flipped the page over. All Johana could discern was a column of numbers and graphs with multicoloured lines.

Breakfast back in Seven was solid, boring and for roughly three-quarters of the population, designed to be on the go. Some of Johanna's earliest memories were of eating densely packed baked oatmeal, still hot to the touch, the kind that her father packed away with him every morning before he got on the freight train and Johanna only ate because she was an early riser and her mother liked to sleep in for a few extra hours.

Even here in the Capitol, the familiar starchy grains were present, only the fair was fuller, with cream, brown sugar and tiny fruits of various colour. The same principle, she noticed, just finer. Johanna took a bowl and sat back near her mentor. "So," she muttered, stabbing at the creamy brown oats. "What's the plan?"

Blight grunted. "Here's the plan: do nothing."

Even with her muted enthusiasm, Johanna couldn't quite hold back the irritation. She mustn't have been able to pull it back in time, because Blight looked up and frowned back at her.

"Oh, you can do things. Just nothing noteworthy. They change it every year, but s'usually consistent," her mentor explained as she methodically ate her breakfast and tried to concentrate on appearing less annoyed than she felt. "Weapons stations, places to train your body - weights, endurance circuits. Climbing walls. Wilderness stations." He sat across from her, shovelling spoons of bacon and scrambled egg onto a flat piece of toast with a notable lack of passion. "Stay on activities safe for Seven. You know what those are?"

Johanna, who's previous understanding of the three day training period consisted largely of ignoring that the Hunger Games existed at all, had to make an educated guess. She glanced across the room, out the window, and narrowed her eyes at an advertisement selling Fat-Free Ice. Huh.

"Axes?"

Blight very nearly smiled. "Not quite. Not wrong, either, but not right now."

At any rate, it was wilderness stations and group activities for her. According to Blight, they were boring and easily ignored, avoided by the tributes from One, Two and Four because they either did not care or were familiar enough with the content to feign disinterest. There were always exceptions - to promote the image of career supremacy, they may give it a once over, but Johanna would be ignored if she played her cards right.

"Remember what I said about Hallmark years?" Johanna had grunted in affirmance at her mentor. Blessedly, that is all that Blight required. "Them Gamemakers are gonna wanna know the spread. They plan ahead according to what they see. We want you going in underestimated."

"Gee, thanks for the encouragement." Johanna took a slice of toast off his plate as she stood up.

Blight snorted and waved her off. Flanked by Peacekeepers, Johanna, armed with warm buttered bread and a mission to simply act miserable, made it down to the training centre just as Atala, the head training instructor, began her welcome speech.

* * *

The underground gymnasium that served as their training centre was more than what Johanna was expecting. Surrounded by floor to ceiling climbing nets and rows of sharp, shiny weapons, as the rest of the Tributes filter off, Johanna bites her lip and tries to think.

"So," Linden's uniform is similar but distinct enough to set them apart. "What are you going to do?"

Johanna doesn't turn around, but she does glance over her shoulder. His hair is washed, he's still-shaven and Johanna would find him attractive if she didn't already hate him. "I'm not sure."

"Could climb some," Linden says, shrugging. "You're supposed to be good at that, right?"

He's not wrong, but Johanna avoids the netting on principle alone and instead drifts over to a survival station that involves finding edible plants within grassy and wooded terrains. The trainer is a younger woman with brown skin and a wide smile, and she happily assists Johanna in the more advanced sections of the station as the other Tributes immerse themselves in the more violent of lessons.

The District One boy is very overly-familiar with a spear as long as he is, and Johanna wonders if he's overcompensating for something when he throws it over ten yards away, where it embeds itself into the chest of a foam target dummy. He smiles at the District 8 boy, who is holding a knife uncertainly and hunches away.

Orville, she thinks, is a cocky fucker. She can't stare for too long, lest it becomes obvious but as she's looking at traps, she notices that he's probably long-ranged. He's got a good arm. He wants the Gamemakers to know it, too. Flint, the Two boy, spends maybe ten minutes with a sword before he concentrates on weights. All the while, his district partner talks to One girl cheerily about skewering Ten Boy's intestines with a wicked stare. Flint, at least, seems uninterested in posturing.

The Four pair, the cousins, stick by one another and have clearly come as a matched set - they fight with twin weapons, work fluidly together, but avoid anything weighty. Either they had a secret skill in deadlifting that they didn't want anyone to know about, or Johanna suspects they're built for agility, not brute strength.

Johanna has seen enough of the games to know that the standard Career alliances went in strong and broke after the first death or so, or if the play was weaker than normal, when the number of targets thinned and the level of competition rose. Sometimes additional tributes got roped in if they were good enough. She makes note of Flint and the Four Cousins, and tries to figure out how to make a fishing knot.

It's not until after dinner when she is approached. Linden has been spending time with Four girl, too much time, talking away while Dylan works on his archery, leaving Johanna alone.

District 5's boy wanders up to her as she is working up the courage to climb the netting, just as they are all called together to learn how to use basic hand to hand with a melee weapon - a lesson she was not looking forward to.

Johanna knew how to throw a punch and while she likely had nothing on the Careers, wondered if that alone was too much.

"You're Johanna, right?" The boy says, and he stops beside her. He's dark-haired and dark-eyed, not un-handsome but plain-looking, and Johanna very nearly sees Adamus in his overly normal features before she bites back the overfamiliarity. _Concentrate_! She admonishes herself. Focus. Remember where you are, what you need to do.

What you know. District 5, Male. Someone-Beginning-With-T. Seventeen. Johanna has seen him making the rounds early this morning, talking to the outlier tributes.

What that means, exactly, she does not know.

"I'm Tomas." He says after that and he puts a hand out, to shake, in the way of greeting.

"I remember." Johanna lies, voice quiet. She looks at his outstretched hand but does not take it. Instead, she folded her arms over her stomach. "Hi."

He looks up at the netting. "You gonna climb that?"

Johanna flicks a glance at the trainer overseeing hand to hand. She shrugs. "I guess not now."

"Guess not all Sevens do that tree climbing thing, huh?" He says. "At least, I don't think your district partner does. He's all legs."

Tomas looks at her a little more closely and Johanna is used to that - to the glances and stares from the blokes at work, so much so that she nearly stands up taller and squares her shoulders, but she remembers where she is, who she is and what she needs to do. She hunches in a little.

"Say, what part of Seven did you say you were from?" He asks, and Johanna frowns.

Johanna has never mentioned anything about Seven, not to him nor to any other tribute. In fact, the only thing about Seven she has talked about is what she did at work, and that was to Blight. Linden guessed, she supposes, likely because of her accent, but how would a non-Seven, a _Five_ , know the difference?

"Oh, the East," Johanna muttered, knowing that it wouldn't give anything away, really.

Much like in the big Districts, the Capitol had pressed for the gradual phasing out of old-world regional names and it had taken effect during her Grandfather's time. Her own specific town, attached to six or so logging camps and one major douglas fir plantation, two sawmills and a factory that specialises in sheathing plywood had the moniker of Douglaswood, but to the Capitol, it was merely Plantation-11.

"So you're a logger, then?" Tomas asks, and it's his turn to frown when Johanna shakes her head. Technically, it's not a lie. But when she expects him to knock it off, walk away and find a different tribute to bother, he laughs. "Well, there goes my chance to get any tips on tree climbing then. All Two knows how to do is climb rocks, and both of the Elevens work on crop farms, not with trees."

Such is a shocking amount of information to give away, Johanna thinks. Granted, she wasn't exactly a pro when it came to Hunger Games info; some kids obsessed over finding out little details, the _secrets_ , convinced they were about to be reaped (or were crazy enough to consider volunteering - there was always one or two), and so she didn't know the system as it were, but, still. It felt odd. Out of place.

Everyone here seemed to be acting out their own individual play. Was this Five Boy's? To make friends with the weaklings so he could, what? Kill them off? Make _friends?_

 _What are you planning?_ She thinks as she watches the boy in the corner of her eye, half-listening to his pointless chatter about how there was effectively nothing he could do in a powerplant to prepare for the games aside from climbing ladders. She wonders what the point is, if making friends is his goal. Why make friends when there is a chance that you could end up skewering them dead in the coming days?

It matters little. Their conversation ends before Tomas can say anything more with the trainer calling them over to their mandatory sparring lesson.

* * *

The first day goes to relative plan. Johanna learns how to make some better snares, to identify some basic plants not from her regional area of Seven and how to potentially get out of a chokehold.

She also learns a lot about her fellow Tributes.

Which is good, because Tacitus and Dara grill them both endlessly throughout breakfast and dinner about their experiences. What they did, who they saw, who saw them, what the other tributes did, who they talked to. Johanna is not entirely sure if she should keep some of her observations secret from Linden and Dara - they are district partners, yes, but also competition.

In the end, she decides to just stay as quiet as possible. Johanna did not have permission to drop the meek little weakling act and while she smarts at the idea of needing permission to act in any way she pleases, sensibility wins out. This wasn't just a power trip of Blight's, she reminds herself. It's life and death. Though she didn't have to like it.

Dinner was a fairly stomachable roast goose with something called sauerkraut, honey glazed carrots and parsnips and bread filled with seeds, cheese or honey. Johanna noticed that her servings were less, this time. She was not sure how to feel about it, but settled on annoyance, as she had elected to for everything involving her mentor's apparently unlimited rights to meddling in her life.

Linden is apparently not under the same restrictions, or maybe he just doesn't care. He asks around a goose leg he was holding between two fingers, "Do Careers normally have such open talents?"

Dara glances at him, then Johanna, and then at Blight - whose only contribution to the conversation thus far had been to ask about the stations available and what kind of groundcover they appeared to emulate, and what Johanna did. The elder mentor sighed.

"Usually," he says. "It wouldn't be the first time we've heard about it. Officially, such talk is nonsense, but I've been in the business since I was fifteen years old and I've seen enough of how One and Two in particular function to know that there's usually an angle."

"What kind of angle?" Johanna surprises herself by saying. For a moment, her mouse-like facade collapses under the sharp intensity of her thoughts. Both of Dara's eyebrows raise. She ducks her head automatically.

Blight clears his throat and wipes his mouth with a napkin. "What they show, they want you to know. The Gamemakers, the other Careers, the other tri-...butes." He sighed, very quietly. "Tributes. Usually, it's all about threatening the playing field and winning over support from the officials. Sometimes they wait for their private session, sometimes not. It usually depends on the atmo'."

"The atmo?" Linden frowns, Dara grunts.

"Atmosphere. Viewer atmosphere, sponsor atmosphere, government atmosphere. It's all mentor lingo, and I don't expect you to understand in full, but it's the Captiol's job to fit the narrative to what the people want." And by people, Johanna thinks, he means _Capitol_ people. The only ones that matter. "And after last year, they'll be wanting action after a pretty disappointing win. Two has a creditable Games team, but any district worth their lot will try to figure out just what to gun for, for your sake. If the tributes are displaying something special, then it's because they want you to notice, because their mentors told them too."

"Just like the things that you're _not_ noticing," Blight adds. He looks up at Johanna, his serious eyes looking into her serious eyes. "But Careers long have a problem with arrogance. They avoid the things they are not good at to make them look good, and those who know what to look for..."

He stabs a parsnip with his meat knife.

"Mistakes are made."

Johanna decides then and there; tomorrow, she is going to work at some of the things she is less good at. She wonders what Blight's strategy was if Dara made him play to his strengths at all. She wonders if thirty-eight years was enough time for Dara to come up with one himself when he was a tribute. If it even mattered.

Did it? After all, Johanna is supposed to go in supposedly undetected. The whole thing seems arbitrary and extreme considering how in all technicality, it's just twenty-four kids killing one another at the end of the day.

And at that thought, the food on her plate is suddenly very unappetising. Johanna wipes her mouth, pushes her plate away and stands up without asking to be excused.

Tacitus tuts and says something about manners, but Dara hushes him. Johanna is three days away from her likely probably demise; she's spent seventeen years asking to be excused from the dinner table at home and she's never going to do it again, as far as she's concerned. She flounces off to her quarters and rips her uniform off.

She leaves all of it in a pile near the door. She takes a shower. She wraps herself up in a bathrobe, sits on the bed, and commands the window to show the image of her end of Seven.

It's too idyllic - there's no stringent organized plantation, ten-by-ten feet for a six-point-four inch average diameter like she is used to. It's all wilds, places Johanna used to run off to and spend her free time before she started working. The only way Johanna will ever see anything like this again, assuming her arena isn't woodland and then, her kind of woodland, is to win and go herself as a victor.

The thought settles in her chest, though not in an unpleasant way. It's a steady weight. It feels like conviction.

There is a knock on her door. A pause. Johanna snaps out of it and shouts, _What_! and the door opens almost instantly; her mentor walks in carrying a black soft-canvas bag that was longer than her forearms. "Oh, it's you."

"'m afraid you'll have to get used to it."," Blight replies as he shuts the door behind him.

Johanna turns back to the window. "I want to see this place when I get out." She is not sure if it is a demand or a plea. Or a plea framed as a demand.

Either way, Blight actually stops in his tracks. Johanna doesn't look at him to gauge his reaction, but when he speaks, his voice is level. "Well, that is very good to hear."

He sits next to her on the bed and examines the image, each palm braced over his knees.

"Probably up near the Kianuko if you submitted an image from somewhere close to you," he noted, blandly. "Unless it's Mount Broadwood, but that's beyond the District line." Blight inhaled and then turned his head to look at her. "Wanna tell me what ya' noticed today?"

"Linden is getting on with the Four girl," Johanna said immediately and Blight nodded.

"Figured, we had Odair up in the apartment at dinner."

"For what?" Johanna had heard about Finnick Odair, and who hadn't? The beautiful deadly boy with the trident and the nets. He'd won the 65th after Cashmere from District 1 and the trend of gorgeous victors only really ended on the 67th with Agustus Braun. All four of them were Capitol sensations. Johanna had seen much of him on TV when she couldn't get away from it, especially since Annie Cresta.

"Customary meet and greet," Blight deflected, but then seemed to think better of it because he laced his fingers together at his knees. "It's normal for mentors to get together when we're not with our tributes, usually prior to solidifying alliances. I don't mind Finnick, he saw the spread and opened up potential agreements, nothing more." He sighs. "I imagine he'll be back tomorrow."

"But not for an alliance with me," she couldn't help it, Johanna sounded and felt bitter.

Blight shrugged. "If we play it right, he'll be paying for it later."

Johanna allowed her self to show her surprise, much like Dara did but without the monster eyebrows. Hers, thanks to genetics and her godforsaken stylists, were much nicer than that now. "That's not a nice thing to say for someone who _doesn't mind_ Finnick."

He raised an eyebrow right back at her. "That's standard mentor protocol for you, kiddo. I'll backstab every one of my compatriots if it means I get you out alive, and the same goes for them in reverse. We wipe clean the scoreboard of disloyalty every time we go 'n get two new kids."

"How noble of you," Johanna hisses, snide and Blight looks back at the image.

"Tell me what else you noticed."

Johanna does. She tells him about the Fours and the Twos, the Ones and their overly-aggressive posturing. She tells him about Five and his talks with the outlier tributes, which piques Blight's interest and he presses for more information. She tells him about the mad boy who has to have a Peacekeeper armed with a tranquillizer shadowing him lest he attacks the other tributes and the assistants. She tells him about the quiet kids and the slightly older ones, about the girl who shakes all the time and was probably on drugs before being reaped.

In the end, Blight nods and tells her _good work_. He slaps her on the shoulder and stands.

"Well, guess we better start preparing now we know the field a 'lil better," he says, and moves to the centre of the room. "Do you know how to do a push-up?"

"Why would I need to know _that_?" Johanna turns to him with a look of utter shock. Again, she was wondering why it was she who had to get saddled with the crazy damaged one.

Blight got down into a push-up position and performed a routine of five effortless ones, before standing. "Like that. I don't want you showcasing your strength - on a female tribute, that's notable outside of scheduled sessions. Instead, I want you to work on your strength endurance in here. Do as many as you can tonight and then do the same tomorrow, before dinner too. That's not the only thing-" he gestured to the bag and opened it.

Johanna actually turned her body around properly when he held out a proper, no fooling _axe_.

It's not the kind that they use at work, forest axes that had embedded tracking chips and had to be handed back to Peacekeepers every shift. This one is sleek and metallic and is used in the arena for districts like theirs. This one had the same orange-grey design from Blight's game. She's seen the replicas.

"It's not real," he warns. "And under no cir-... no circumstances, must you bring it out into the apartment. It's not sharp but it will hurt people if you hit 'em an I can tell you now, the Captiol knows it too. I want you to do what I tell you, and then put it under your bed, understand?"

Johanna blinked. "Do what with it?"

"It's the same weight as my old one. Not the same, because that thing was... unusable... but practically the same design, just no edge." To punctuate his point, he dragged the palm of his hand over the axe blade. "There are only a few ways you can go about swinging an axe to hit someone, I want you to practice doing just that, away from prying eyes."

Sure enough, Blight showed her how to swing it properly. Overhead, underarm, a left-hand swing inward. He gestured for her to take it and Johanna stood there, holding this well-worn former-tool of death, and decided she liked the weight of it.

"Twenty-five swings each in the evening, fifty in the morning if you can do it - though I figure you can. Only in here. If you need help, leave it under the bed and come get me."

"This can't be normal mentor procedure," Johanna looks up at him through narrowed eyes, and he shrugs.

"Aint no other mentor like me, kiddo. 'Sides, I figure it isn't too bad so long as we don't make a fuss now, is it? It's hardly a fucking Career academy."

"No," Johanna pantomimes swinging the axe overhead. She imagines One Boy beneath her and scowls. "No, I guess not."


End file.
